Altcoins News

Story: Litecoin’s Double-Spend Patch Sits Unused on 70% of Nodes Two Months Later

By James Thorp

1 / 15

What Actually Happened in April. The attack hit on April 25. A malformed MWEB peg-out transaction slipped through — a tiny input…

2 / 15

Why the Slow Adoption Matters. Litecoin carries a market cap of $3.4 billion. That's not a small number.

3 / 15

Where the Network Stands Now. No timeline exists for when — or whether — the remaining nodes will update.

4 / 15

Most Litecoin nodes are still running software that can't stop a repeat of April's double-spend attack. That's a problem nobody seems to be fixing fast enough.

5 / 15

Less than 30% of nodes have installed the patches released after a hacker exploited a flaw in Litecoin's MimbleWimble Extension Block — known as MWEB — transactions. The rest?

6 / 15

The attack hit on April 25. A malformed MWEB peg-out transaction slipped through — a tiny input backing a much larger withdrawal, effectively conjuring illegitimate Litecoin out…

7 / 15

The flaw traces back to how Litecoin Core handles MWEB transactions. MWEB, activated in 2022, was built to give Litecoin users better transaction privacy. Good idea in theory.

8 / 15

Litecoin Core v0.21.5.4 dropped the day after the reorganization event — April 25 — targeting denial-of-service attack vectors on mining pools.

9 / 15

Litecoin carries a market cap of $3.4 billion. That's not a small number. And the security of that network depends almost entirely on node operators keeping their software…

10 / 15

Read also: Congress Members Could Lose Prediction Market Profits Under Steils $2,000 Fine Bill

11 / 15

And that's kind of where things stand right now.

12 / 15

The Litecoin team has pushed hard for adoption, urging all users to move to the latest versions and making clear what's at stake.

13 / 15

The gap between mining nodes and non-mining validating nodes is worth paying attention to here.

14 / 15

No timeline exists for when — or whether — the remaining nodes will update. The Litecoin team hasn't specified a deadline, and there's no mechanism in a decentralized network to…

15 / 15

See also: Franklin Templeton Bets on Bitcoin with Two New Dividend-Reinvesting ETFs

The Currency Analytics

Want the full story?